


The Thing About Tony

by Laura Kaye (laurakaye)



Series: Laura's Home For Abandoned Stories [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Avengers Tower, Coulson Lives, Domestic Avengers, F/M, M/M, Minor Clint Barton/Phil Coulson, Post-Avengers (2012), Smart Steve, Tony Stark Has A Heart, WIP Amnesty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 14:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4525320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurakaye/pseuds/Laura%20Kaye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People seem to expect Steve to be a prude, a killjoy, and patriotic to the point of blind loyalty. He’s not sure if that’s due to assumptions about the 40s or if the posthumous comics and movies about Captain America were just deeply unflattering in their portrayal. He figures he’s got time to work on it.</p>
<p>Then, he meets Anthony Edward Stark, and things spin rapidly out of control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing About Tony

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome once again to Laura's Home for Abandoned Stories, where I post things that have a substantial amount of finished work done but that I don't ever plan to finish.
> 
> This particular story was the first one I ever started writing in MCU fandom, at the time right after Avengers had come out, and thus is very rooted in the popular fannish conventions of the time. It was originally supposed to cover Steve and Tony's evolving friendship and eventual relationship in the context of the Avengers settling into the Tower, and was also growing a significant fix-it Clint/Coulson plotline. 
> 
> There are a lot of the finished bits of this that I really like, but it's been languishing unfinished on my hard drive for three years and is unlikely to ever be done, because honestly I got seduced away into the land of the Clint/Coulson OTP and most of my fannish energies are there. 
> 
> As I usually do in these, I have included bracketed notes that indicate the plot notes that were intended for the finished story. I hope you can find some enjoyment out of these snippets!

The Thing About Tony

  


One of the first things Steve realizes when he wakes up in the twenty-first century - well, OK, honestly, one of the first things he realizes once he calms down enough to be able to realize anything-- is that most people, even people who should really know better, expect him to be kind of thick. It’s not that anyone ever says as much; it’s more in the way that they explain things like Google to him _every time_ it’s mentioned.

For the record, Google is mentioned a lot in the twenty-first century.

Admittedly, he’s kind of offended at first, but he quickly figures out that a) this could serve as a tactical advantage and b) it happens so often that it’s probably related to some sort of unrelated socio-cultural factor and not actually about him personally.

(He starts taking note of overheard snatches of conversation that seem like they might shed light on things-- because even though it’s well known that Captain America has extremely acute senses, people never seem to put that together and realize that _he can hear them_ \-- and somewhere in the intersection of the searches on “dumb blonde,” “meathead,” and “roid rage,” he thinks he’s got a good grasp of what’s going on.)

He understands why people tend to focus on the physical aspects of the serum; all you have to do is look at the before-and-after of him to see why. It’s obvious, that he grew more than a foot and put on about 150 pounds of muscle and bone in a few seconds. And people also remember the other physical things, the speed and agility, the resilience and the healing. 

What most people forget is that Steve Rogers was a smart guy with an excellent visual memory. Post-serum, Captain America has an eidetic memory and a tested IQ of 187. Steve knows for a fact that this was recorded in some detail in his files-- he’d had to take the IQ test six times-- so he’s a little disappointed that the only people in SHEILD who seem to actually remember this fact are Director Fury and Agent Coulson, neither of whom he gets to interact with much. He can tell there’s something big in the works (again, super-enhanced senses, eidetic memory, and advanced strategic and tactical field experience) and he’s getting really tired of being put off and told to rest and acclimate (read: go to therapy and try to adjust to losing everyone and everything you had, essentially overnight) while everyone else is working.

The other thing, of course, the change that Steve has never actually told anyone about, is that Steve doesn’t need near as much _rest and acclimation_ as people think he should. It’s hard to explain-- it isn’t that he doesn’t feel things, or that he doesn’t feel them as deeply as he used to, or that he’s some kind of robot or that there’s something _wrong_ with him; it’s just that the things that hurt... get better faster, now.

He compares it to his physical healing, though he suspects it’s more related to his increased mental processing speed, and maybe to the fact that Steve Rogers was an optimist and a romantic, despite his hot temper, and after the serum he’s even more so.

(The temper’s no better as Captain America than it was in the days when he was mouthing off to jerks in Brooklyn; it’s just that he thinks faster, now, and can usually talk himself down before he does something stupid.)

He never talks about it, though, the emotional thing. He worries that people will think he’s a sociopath or something. The trouble is, he’s stuck in twice-weekly SHIELD-mandated therapy, and he’s not sure how to get through it without letting on that he’s done about a year’s worth of working through what Dr. Lopez calls “the challenges of his situation” in the six weeks since he woke up in that horrible fake hospital room. He still has bad days-- sometimes he has horrible days-- and sometimes he'll see someone out of the corner of his eye and think for just a moment that it's Bucky, or Peggy, or one of the Commandoes, and the lurch of remembering makes him physically ill every time. But he's reached the point of recovery where he can be mostly okay, a lot of the time, and he's dying for something useful to do. 

When Director Fury finally comes to find him and gives him something, it’s about the best news Steve could have heard. He’s not happy that there’s an alien invasion, of course... he’s just happy that they’re letting him _help_. That they’re giving him a team again. He thinks that things just might start getting better from here.

(People also seem to expect Steve to be a prude, a killjoy, and patriotic to the point of blind loyalty. He’s not sure if that’s due to assumptions about the 40s or if the posthumous comics and movies about Captain America were just deeply unflattering in their portrayal. He figures he’s got time to work on it.

Then, he meets Anthony Edward Stark, and things spin rapidly out of control.)

The thing about Stark is that he is just so. Damned. Annoying, and Steve could swear he’s doing it on purpose. Stark struts. He preens. He boasts. He disrespects chain of command, his father’s memory, SHIELD, Directory Fury, the US military, the US government, Congress, Steve himself, and, as far as Steve can determine, anything and anybody that tries to tell him what to do. He calls people childish nicknames. He interrupts. He picks at people until he finds a soft spot and then needles it until something cracks. He has no respect for the concept of need-to-know. Saying that Stark rubs Steve the wrong way is such a massive understatement that Steve is fairly sure he’d need to learn a new mathematical discipline to accurately express just how massive.

And yet.

And yet Stark seems to be the only person on the helicarrier Dr. Banner actually warms to. And yet apparently Stark is such a genius that even SHIELD has no choice but to hire him to design them technology. At first that just makes Steve madder, that Stark would hold his country’s security hostage to his whims, but then when Loki’s forces attack the helicarrier Stark lets himself be nearly torn to pieces restarting the engine, immediately after having a horrible fight with Steve and Director Fury both at once. And then Stark looks genuinely upset when the Director tells them about Agent Coulson, who Steve hadn’t even realized that Stark knew. He tries to help, then-- tries to work himself up to talking about losing a comrade, about Bucky-- but Stark cuts him off, sudden and venomous.

“We are _not soldiers_.”

And maybe, Steve thinks, maybe that’s the heart of it, right there, but there isn’t time to puzzle it out right then.

They’ve got a city to save.

The thing about Stark, Steve thinks later, is that he makes absolutely no sense at all. Steve had been certain, he would have _sworn_ , that Stark was in it for the glory and the thrill, that he had no concept of teamwork, of duty, of sacrifice, that he’d stand by and let anyone else take the hard risks while he reaped the rewards. Shallow, he’d thought. Just a matter of time until he leaves us in the lurch. Nobody worth depending on. Just hollow words and booze poured into a suit and only tolerated because of certain material benefits he could bring to the table.

Now, of course, he keeps hearing Stark over the comms, holding the death of millions in his hands and wrestling it to his will like it was no big deal. He keeps seeing that flashy metal suit plummeting out of the sky.

He feels like the world’s biggest heel. He’s supposed to be a leader, he’s supposed to set an example, but if he could be _that wrong_ about Stark, who knows what else he’s missed? 

He’d been given tactical reports about all the Avengers, information about their capabilities and preferences in combat. The intelligence had been good, but obviously not good enough. 

He asks Directory Fury for comprehensive files, and after an excruciating five minutes of silence where they just sit and look at each other (how can a man with one eye lay you open with his gaze like that?) Fury nods, once, and makes it happen.

He has to read the files all alone, with no note-taking or recording equipment, in a tiny windowless room in one of SHIELD’s secure archives. (He wonders if Director Fury knows about his photographic memory, then thinks that probably he does; he seems to know everything else.) He gives in to his baser impulses and pulls Stark’s first, opens it up to the beginning and starts reading like a novel.

It starts out pretty much like he would have expected; Howard had married late in life, had his only son even later. The file has school transcripts - boarding schools, from the age of eight, and Steve wondered, why had Howard sent his son away so young? Academic reports, behavior reports, all telling a pretty consistent tale: glowing assessments of his intelligence, laced with words like _prodigy_ and _genius_ , interspersed with “Anthony continues to have difficulty interacting socially with peers his own age,” “Anthony tends to isolate himself due to difficulty in communicating with other students,” “Anthony resists activities intended to help him develop emotionally and socially.” And one stray, handwritten note, obviously not something meant to be part of the permanent record- “Suggested to father that Tony might do better in a more nurturing environment - no go.”

The transcripts change, soon, moving to college in just a few years, and Steve finds himself reluctantly impressed-- a degree at seventeen, several more following soon after, a single-spaced typed list several pages long of awards, patents, publications, honors. 

The next page is the report on Howard’s death, and Steve has to set the file down and walk away for a while. It just seems wrong for Howard to die like that, to something as mundane as a car accident. It seems like SHIELD thought so, too-- there are a number of reports into it, looking for hidden connections or motives, but in the end it was just what it had appeared: a foggy night, a wet road, a driver dropping his cigarette.

There’s a picture of the funeral. Tony Stark is next to a tall, powerful-looking man who has a hand on his hunched shoulder. In his black suit, he looks very small and very young, his eyes large and dark, his face pale. The caption identifies the man as “Acting CEO of Stark Industries Obadiah Stane.”

Between the time his parents died and the time he was deemed old enough to take over their company, Stark earned three degrees. Two PhD's, in physics and electrical engineering, and a master's degree in computer science. Apparently, he needed something to fill his time in between parties. There's a lot of information about the parties, too. There's so much press coverage of his shenanigans that the SHIELD agent who compiled the report has put a sarcastic note on the cover sheet, calling Tony a "celebutante". Steve isn't sure what a celebutante is, but it doesn't sound complementary. There's something about Stark's face in the newspaper photographs of him, lurching drunkenly around bars and clubs and press events, beautiful women on his arm, that looks... false. Of course, Steve could be deluding himself; even that young, it’s possible Stark was just too jaded to show anything on his face but ennui. 

There are also lots of articles about Stark and Obadiah Stane. They posed together on magazine covers,gave interviews about each other, accepted awards on each other's behalf. Steve wonders whether the man was truly a father figure to Stark, or if he was more invested in the company.

There is a brief flurry of press coverage after Stark takes over Howard's company. Apparently, he’d just been waiting to unleash many new inventions, a debut of sorts. Steve is momentarily bewildered by the scope and variety of the weapons that Stark apparently designed as a teenager. Even Hydra didn't have anything nearly as impressive as some of this work. Of course, Stark didn't have the Cube, but that's probably a good thing. Steve shudders to think what a mind like his could have made with that much power. 

When he comes upon the first reports of Stark's abduction, he takes a deep breath. This is it, then, the thing that started it all. He knew the broad outlines of what happened, that Stark had been kidnapped, that he built the first Iron Man suit to escape. But he hadn't read the details. 

The summary report is still pretty dry. But when Steve starts reading the supplementary pages attached to it, he feels his stomach drop. He hadn't realized that what happened to Stark was so horrific. The man had been reluctant to debrief the army after his rescue; he had given a brief overview that amounted to basically "got kidnapped, escaped. You found me. I'd like to go home now." But apparently Agent Coulson (God rest his soul) had eventually been able to get more out of him than that. 

He knows that Stark can be brave. He’s seen him be brave. But even so, he wouldn't have pegged him for this certain kind of courage. The battle for New York wasn't easy, but at least it was clear-cut, the enemies and their motives mostly apparent. This sort of thing, though, kidnapping and torture, a man's body being turned against him-- there was something twisted and poisonous in it, something very difficult to fight. Steve had seen good men ruined by it, brave men, men with training. So how had it come to be that Stark came out the other side?

The medical reports are the worst thing. He knew that Stark had an arc reactor in his chest, (whatever that meant - the best he could gather, it was some sort of power supply) and he knew that it somehow keeps Stark alive. But all the tactical reports SHIELD had given him had said were that the reactor and its infrastructure made Stark's chest a weak point. That when he wasn't in the armor, it was important to avoid further trauma to the area.

He'd never thought about what had gone out so that the reactor could be put in (most of the sternum, parts of four ribs) or what had been shoved out of place to make it fit (parts of both lungs, both pectoral muscles.) He'd never thought about ongoing issues beyond tagging Stark's unarmored chest a weak point (reduced lung capacity, impaired range of motion, susceptibility to chest and lung infections, constant threat of further injury from the cluster of shrapnel endangering the heart.)

His chest aches as he reads how Stark fooled his captors into giving him the tools of their own destruction, how he escaped into the desert in a suit of armor built of scraps and desperation. He reads breathless analysis of the press conference where he turned aside from the basis of his reputation, fortune, and family legacy. He reads Agent Coulson's report of the showdown with Stane, the uncovered truth of the abduction, the black market weapon sales, the theft of Stark's arc reactor, the truth of Stane's death and its cover story. He reads the Black Widow's reports from her time undercover, of Stark's poisoning and self-destructive behavior, of the way he performed a literal miracle to save himself just in time.

He thinks her summation is maybe a little harsher than it needed to be.

He thinks of how he had Stark had circled each other like spitting cats.

_(Big man in a suit. Take that away, what are you?)_

He thinks of how Stark's fingers creep to touch the arc reactor, like maybe he's reassuring himself that it's still there.

He thinks of the time he'd stumbled on a bird's nest in the park, how the bird had puffed up its feathers and flown at him, defending itself from the threatening unknown.

He is ashamed of himself, and, pettier but no less disturbing, embarrassed about the whole thing; he’s always liked to think of himself as a good person, a fair person, and realizing that he’s done someone such an injustice sits sour in his guts. Knowing that he is probably only the latest in a long line to be taken in by Stark’s defensive threat display doesn’t really help.

("Call me Tony," Stark had said, after they had saved Manhattan from invading aliens, after Iron Man had wrestled a nuclear bomb into space and nearly died doing it, after they had slumped bone-weary and brushing shards of building and gobs of alien blood out of their hair to eat a truly absurd amount of shawarma. His grin was more a smirk, wry and tired, and more genuine than Steve had ever seen on his face.)

Steve will make this right if it kills him.

The first step, he decides, is obviously to apologize to Stark. He’s under no illusions that it won’t be a painful process— Stark has no reason (and has heretofore shown little inclination) to take it gracefully, or make things easy on him, but that’s no excuse to shirk.

Of course, when he leaves the file bunker and Director Fury requests a few days of his time assisting SHIELD R&D, he agrees with a tinge of slightly-ashamed relief. 

The next week is taken up with tests: physical endurance, strength, lung capacity, muscle repair times... sometimes Steve wonders if they actually have a purpose in mind for all the data they’re collecting or if it’s just scientific curiosity. Finally, though, he can no longer in good conscience tell himself that he’s giving Stark a chance to rest up after the battle and is forced to admit he’s putting off apologizing because he’s pretty sure it will be mortifying. So he tells Dr. Chen that he’s got other engagements and she assures him that they’ve got enough data to work with for now, and Steve starts off toward Stark Tower.

He realizes halfway there that Stark has a fleet of jets and a flying suit, and he should probably call first to make sure he’s in. He goes sheepishly back to SHIELD, where he asks Agent Wright, his liaison (Steve is careful not to think of him as a babysitter, though some days it’s easier than others) if he can get Steve Tony Stark’s phone number.

“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” Wright says, and twenty minutes later knocks on Steve’s door with a business card.

Naturally, it’s thick and heavy and expensive—engraved, and Steve would bet that’s custom type too. The ink is surprisingly gorgeous—it looks black when viewed straight on, but at an angle it gleams metallic red. There are flakes of what Steve is pretty sure is real gold leaf embedded in the card stock. Other than the lavish materials, though, the design of the card is a lot more restrained than Steve would have predicted; just Stark’s name in the middle, and a phone number. It’s probably meant to be intimidating, but honestly Steve can’t help but feel kind of wistful over the quality of the ink and paper. It’s a beautiful example of the printer’s art, and he finds himself hoping that Stark designed it personally. Maybe if things go well, Steve can ask him.

He picks up his phone, navigates the complex procedure to get an outside, secured line, and dials. The call is answered on the second ring by a woman with such a deep, rich voice, Steve wonders if she’s an opera singer or something.

“Office of Tony Stark, Dominique Dupin speaking. How may I be of assistance?”

“Good afternoon,” Steve says. “This is Captain Steve Rogers. I was hoping to arrange a meeting with Mr. Stark?”

“I’m terribly sorry, Captain Rogers, but I’m afraid that will be impossible. Due to the recent events in New York, Mr. Stark is not making new appointments at this time.”

Steve is pretty sure that Stark would at least give him fifteen minutes here or there, but he’s not sure how to convince the lady on the phone of that without coming across as an entitled jerk. Also, he’s beginning to suspect that this phone number isn’t the one Stark gives people he actually wants to talk to.

“I see,” he says. “Could you pass along a message for me, in that case?”

“Of course, Captain, go ahead.”

“Just let him know that I called, and I would appreciate it if he got in touch when he can. The number here is 212-895-4817.”

“Please call Captain Steve Rogers at 212-895-4817,” she repeats.

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve confirmed. “Thank you.”

“Thank you, Captain. Have a pleasant day.”

Steve hangs up the phone with a sigh. “Well, that was a waste of time,” he tells the receiver. He wishes, with a pang, that Agent Coulson was there; somehow, the man had always seemed to know everything, but he never rubbed your face in it. He’d been a comforting sort of person to have around.

He calls up to Director Fury’s office and asks his secretary—no, his _assistant—_ if Director Fury has any meetings scheduled with Mr. Stark in the near future. In a surprising reversal of his recent luck, he learns that there actually is a meeting scheduled to discuss helicarrier repairs the next afternoon. Steve thanks Agent Groves and decides to go work out for a while, content that he’s got the basis of a plan. Hopefully he’ll be able to catch Stark on the way in or out and make an appointment, or at least get a better contact number.

His confidence is shaken the next day, when instead of Mr. Stark he runs into a tall, elegant woman with strawberry blonde hair in the waiting room outside the Director’s office. It takes him a moment to recognize her from Stark’s file, when—

“Captain Rogers?” she says, smiling, reaching out to shake his hand. “I’m Pepper Potts.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss—Ms. Potts,” Steve says, shaking her hand and trying to think of a way to ask if Stark was coming without seeming ungracious.

“And you as well, Captain,” Ms. Potts says. “Tony thinks very highly of you.”

“He _does_?” Steve blurts, and then feels himself turning red. “I mean, that’s very kind of him, it’s just—”

Ms. Potts laughs, but not unkindly. “Tony has something of a unique communication style,” she says. “But trust me, Captain, he was very pleased with what he’s seen of the Avengers thus far, and he looks forward to continuing the association going forward.”

“That’s actually why I’m here,” Steve says hopefully. Ms. Potts seems like the kind of woman who makes problems vanish; perhaps he doesn’t need to see Mr. Stark today after all. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with Mr. Stark, but apparently he isn’t taking new appointments?”

“That’s strange,” she says, forehead creasing. “All the Avengers are supposed to be on the priority access list. What number have you been calling?”

“This one,” Steve says, digging out the business card and handing it to her. She glances at it and sighs, shaking her head. “Let me guess,” she says. “You got this card from SHIELD?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve confirms.

She pulls out a sleek little phone and starts typing furiously. “Tony should have given you his direct line,” she says, “or at least his real phone number. That one’s just for annoying clients and people who want to ask for money.”

“I had suspected something of the kind,” Steve admits, and Ms. Potts shoots him a grin, which makes her nose wrinkle a bit; it’s a very human, approachable look, and for the first time in the conversation, Steve feels a little less like an awkward rube. He grins back.

Her phone buzzes, about half a dozen times in quick succession. “Tony says he’s sorry, and he’ll meet with you today,” she says, looking up. “If that works for you?”

“Oh! Of course, anytime is fine,” Steve says, “please don’t go to any trouble. I can wait until another day now that I know I can get on the schedule.” 

“Not at all, Captain,” she says. “This meeting shouldn’t take more than half an hour, so if you’d care to meet me back here then, you can ride with me back to the Tower.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Steve says. “Thank you very much.”

“Believe me,” Ms. Potts says, as Director Fury’s office door opens, “the pleasure is mine.”

Steve doesn’t really have anywhere to be, so he sits down on the couch outside the Director’s door and flips through a three-month-old copy of _Federal Executive_ while he waits for the meeting to be over. He’s glad he didn’t leave, because the door opens again in twenty-three minutes. He supposes you have to be pretty efficient to run a giant company, and he already knows that the Director has little patience for dilly-dallying.

Ms. Potts looks pleased to see him sitting there. “Captain,” she says, nodding pleasantly to Agent Groves as she passes. “Ready to go?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve says. 

“This way,” she says, and then strides down the corridor like she lives at SHIELD. (Well, to be honest, Steve actually does live at SHIELD and he’s not at all sure he portrays such effortless confidence in his stride, and he’s positive he wouldn’t be able to do so in four inch heels while texting.) They’re picked up at the door in a black town car, and Steve can’t help but look around a little in surprise; he’s seen the kind of cars Stark drives around in, and this is very definitely not his normal speed.

Ms. Potts glances up and grins at him again.

“I know, not what you were expecting, right?” she says. “Tony likes to make a splash, but I prefer to retain a little mystery now and then. Plus, it’s a lot easier for Happy to find somewhere to park. I’d be happy in a cab, honestly, but Tony worries it’d be a security risk.”

Steve thinks about that. “Yeah, it’d be a shame to get kidnapped by some kind of supervillain cabbie,” he says.

“The original concern was corporate espionage,” she remarks lightly, “but lately that has also been a concern.”

“Oh,” Steve says. He feels kind of awkward now. Ms. Potts goes back to her phone, and they’re quiet all the way to the Tower.

The driver (and he’s really called Happy, apparently, which Steve finds kind of charming) pulls them through a series of complicated security gates into an underground parking garage that is filled with exactly the sort of cars Steve associates with Stark. Ms. Potts leads him into the fastest, quietest elevator he’s ever been in; his ears pop as it zips up to the penthouse.

“Welcome, Ms. Potts, Captain Rogers,” says the elevator as they get out, and Steve does not flinch, but he kind of wants to. Now that he’s this close to being able to apologize to Stark, he’s bracing himself for it, stomach knotted in dread. He can take a lot of humiliation, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. He reminds himself that, above everything else, he needs to keep his temper or he’ll make things worse.

He’d been up here before, right after the battle, but he hadn’t been paying much attention, what with Loki in the floor and all. One of the windows is boarded up and there’s caution tape around the hole in the floor (although the poles holding the tape have been festooned with red and gold party hats). Apart from that, it doesn’t look half bad. Not really Steve’s taste in decorating, he wasn’t crazy about all the leather and chrome tubes, but it certainly had a sleek, mechanical aesthetic. 

“Pep!” Stark calls, moving into view. “And Cap! Pep and Cap, that sounds like a variety show. Welcome to my humble abode, Captain. Drink?”

Steve blinks. Stark is wearing tattered blue jeans, a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and red canvas sneakers. There are streaks of grime up and down his forearms and, judging from the state of his knees, he’s been kneeling in plaster dust. He’s got one of those insulated steel coffee mugs in one hand and a carpenter’s pencil tucked behind his ear. He isn’t wearing his usual sunglasses, and there’s something a little odd in his bearing, like a tense man trying to appear relaxed. Steve isn’t sure whether that makes what he’s come to do easier or harder.

“No thank you, Mr. Stark, I’m fine,” he says. “I really appreciate your making time to see me today.”

Stark raises his eyebrows at Steve, a wry twist to his mouth. “Think nothing of it,” he says. “Any friend of Captain America, et cetera. What can I do for you?”

Steve squares his shoulders, looks Stark in the eye, and tries to project sincerity and contrition. “I wanted to apologize,” he says, and Stark starts waving his hands.

“Not necessary!” he says. “We were all under a lot of stress—”

“I misjudged you when we met,” Steve continues doggedly. If he doesn’t say it now, he might never be able to, and he worked a long time on this speech. “I let myself be blinded by—”

“Water under the bridge, really. Hell, everyone hates me when they meet me, just ask Pepper—”

“Superficial things and my own preconceptions. It was wrong and unfair. You saved—”

“Myself, right, you know how it goes, I _just_ finished this tower—”

“My life, the lives of your teammates, and the lives of millions of New Yorkers, not to mention preventing untold damage to priceless cultural and artistic artifacts—”

“Seriously? Are we seriously going to—”

“I would be very grateful if you could forgive me, and I want you to know that I would consider it an honor to continue to fight by your side.”

“Do this?” Stark sputters, and then just stares at him. Steve tries not to shift his weight uneasily.

“Tony,” Ms. Potts says from behind him, and Steve had actually forgotten she was still there in his anxiousness to get his apology out. He can feel his ears burning.

“Oh, fine,” Stark sighs. “We’ll hug it out. Look, Rogers, there was a lot of shit going on and none of us handled it well, myself most definitely included. As far as I’m concerned, we can write it all off to Loki’s magic deathstick of crankiness and never speak of it again. In fact, please, I beg of you, never speak of it again, and we can call it good. OK?”

Steve relaxes all at once, and the sheer relief of it makes him grin at Stark. “OK,” he says. Stark looks a little taken aback, then smirks at him. 

“Well!” He says, punctuating his exclamation with a clap of the hands. His coffee sloshes out of the top of the mug. He frowns and licks the drops off the back of his hand. “That was very touching, let’s never do it again. Now, Captain, let’s talk future plans.”

“What kind of plans?”

Stark gets a strange gleam in his eye and starts talking. It turns out that he’s got some really interesting ideas for the team; equipment upgrades, tactics, training facilities. For all his posturing he’s got some real insight into ways to enhance the way the team is already inclined to work, and when Steve cautiously asks if this work is part of his SHIELD contract he scoffs and waves an airy hand. 

“Whatever,” he declares, “you think I’m going to let you guys watch my back with shitty off-the-rack SHIELD gear? I have a reputation to maintain. Plus, with you guys on-site, it’ll be like having permanent on-call beta testers.”

“On-site? What do you mean?”

Stark flicks the schematic they were looking at away, and pulls up a blueprint with a few gestures. “I couldn’t decide what to do with some of the floors on the Tower,” he says, pulling up the section just below the penthouse and zooming in on it. His voice is casual, but his shoulders are tight. “So I thought, hey! We can make our very own superhero frat house. Get a headquarters for the team that isn’t liable to be shot out of the sky, maybe put in a bowling alley or something. The designs aren’t quite done, but… well, here.” He drags his finger through the air, and one of the floors enlarges further. There’s a symbol in the corner of the plans, a radiation warning icon. “This is Bruce’s floor. Well, technically, floors. It’s kind of a combo.” He drags the blueprint around. “On this half, It’s got an ordinary two-story apartment, and over here, I’m knocking the two floors together to make a nice big playroom for the Hulk. I’m thinking we can put some stuff in there he can smash for fun, maybe some stuff to calm him down… do they make ten-foot tall stuffed animals? I’ll have to get on that. The walls in the Hulk room will have the same level of reinforcement as the containment spaces on the helicarrier, but with a regular-sized door so Bruce can let himself out when he’s done. And I’m also reinforcing the whole structural envelope around the floor, adding some adamantium to the struts, that kind of thing.”

“That’s amazing,” Steve says, honestly. “Does this mean Dr. Banner will be staying in New York?”

“Oh, he’s staying,” Stark says. “He may not have admitted it to himself yet, but he’s staying. No scientist can spend time working in my R&D labs and voluntarily leave again. Just ask Pepper, our turnover rates are the lowest in the industry.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I was hoping the team would stay together; it was nice to be part of a unit again.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Stark says. “So, for your floor, do you have any decorating preferences? Or should I just let Pepper go to town?”

Steve blinks. “My what?”

“Your floor,” Stark says. “Your apartment here in the Tower. Keep up. “ With a few more gestures he puts Dr. Banner’s floor away and pulls out another one. Sure enough, there’s a small picture of his shield in the corner.

“That’s very generous of you, but honestly, Mr. Stark, there’s no need—”

“I can’t imagine your previous landlord kept your lease open for seventy years,” Stark says, rolling his eyes. “And nobody should have to live at SHIELD, that place is horrifying.”

“I’m used to barracks, Mr. Stark.”

“Newsflash, Cap, the war’s over and you are now bankrolled by a billionaire. Look, you said it yourself, you want to keep the team together, right?”

“…Right,” Steve says suspiciously.

“And can you seriously imagine me, Thor, or Bruce spending any more time than absolutely necessary at SHIELD?”

Steve tries to imagine it. He isn’t very successful. 

“Right, exactly. Not to mention, by the time the repairs are finished this building will have the most stringent security in the country.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “Look, Captain, I know that you’re all about teamwork and probably want us to, I dunno, roast marshmallows and sing campfire songs, but I’m just not wired up that way. This, though? This I can do, and I’d appreciate it if you’d let me.”

Steve looks around. Stark does have a point about security and unit cohesion, and besides that, the Tower is certainly a lot more luxurious than anywhere Steve has lived or even seen before. Also, for some reason, Stark really seems to want him to say yes. He feels his resolve weakening. “I really appreciate it, Mr. Stark,” he says, “but I’d have to speak with Director Fury about living off-base before I could possibly accept.”

Stark regards him seriously for a moment. “SHIELD doesn’t own you, Cap,” he says. “They may have pulled you out of the ice, but that doesn’t mean you have to do everything they want. Just remember that. And for God’s sake,” he adds, his tone lighter, “call me Tony.”

Steve finds himself oddly touched. It’s not that he doesn’t know SHIELD doesn’t technically have authority over him, it’s just that Sta— Tony is the first person who’s ever actually said so. “In that case, Tony, it’s Steve.” He sticks out his hand, and Tony, looking amused, shakes it. It’s kind of a cliché, Steve thinks, but this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

As long as they don’t kill each other, that is. Steve thinks the odds are probably right about even.

.

The thing about Sta— _Tony._ The thing about Tony is that he complains about them all constantly but he seems to want them around him all the time. Steve tries not to over-analyze people’s emotional motivations— Lord knows he hates when people do that to him— but he can’t help thinking back to those notes in Tony’s school file. _Anthony struggles to relate socially to his peers._ Steve’s not sure what that meant when he was eight, but nowadays Tony alternates between hovering in the common areas, inserting himself into every conversation, and locking himself away in his workshop for days on end, refusing all human contact.

Thor hasn’t come back from Asgard yet, and Dr. Banner has actually been living at the Tower since after the battle, so Steve ended up moving in straight from SHIELD on the same day as Agent Barton and Agent Romanoff. None of them had brought much stuff, so at least it wasn’t a difficult move. Tony had been in the middle of an engineering binge and hadn’t actually realized they’d moved in until the next day, when he had wandered blearily into the large common kitchen while Steve and Agent Romanoff were eating breakfast before going downstairs to train together. He’d blinked at them, then stolen Steve’s coffee and pointed at Agent Romanoff with it.

“No stabbings,” he’d said. Agent Romanoff had met his eyes and nodded. 

“All right then,” Tony had said, then wandered away again muttering about alloys. 

“What was that all about?” Steve had asked, getting up to get another mug.

“SHIELD had me undercover at Stark Industries to evaluate him for the Initiative.”

“I saw the report.”

“He was… displeased at the deception involved.”

Steve had nodded, and she’d shot him a sharp look. “What, no commentary?”

He’d shrugged. “Seems to me you two are working it out all right. No need for me to stick my oar in.”

“I appreciate it,” she’d said, rising to tidy away her dishes. “It’s certainly a rare enough attitude around here.”

“I don’t think Tony means to… wait, no. He probably does mean to be interfering, but I don’t think he means it in a bad way.”

“Actually, I agree with you,” she’d said. “It will just take some getting used to. I’m accustomed to a… subtler style.”

They’d left it at that, then, and gone down to the gym to work on some two-man tactics Steve was developing for them. Two hours later, sweaty and panting, Steve had looked over at her and felt suddenly very glad that she was willing to give up her accustomed ways of doing things to give the team a chance.

“Agent Romanoff?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

She’d let her mouth curl up, just a little, at one corner. “When you’re able to pin me two out of three, you may call me Natasha.”

It had taken another week, but eventually he’d made it happen.

.

They’ve all been living in the Tower for three weeks before he sees Agent Barton again. He’d send out a message to everyone inviting them to his floor for dinner—it seemed like the thing to do—but Bruce had some sort of experiment that couldn’t be left and Tony had some kind of emergency with the company that had required him to fly out to California at short notice and Agent Barton hasn’t replied to any messages since he moved in, so he was more or less expecting it to just be him and Natasha. When he hears her knock, he’s over the stove whisking gravy.

“It’s open!” he calls.

“You know, Steve, it kind of defeats the purpose of a bleeding-edge security system if you leave your door unlocked,” Natasha says, on her way in.

“The elevator doesn’t even stop at this floor without a retinal scan; I wasn’t too worried,” Steve says easily. He turns to pour the gravy into the gravy boat (extra-large, because Steve loves gravy) and almost drops the pan when he sees Agent Barton standing behind Natasha. He looks like he’d be hiding behind her if he weren’t several inches taller and half again as wide as she is; he’s got dark rings below his eyes and his face is scruffy with stubble, and his left hand is in a cast.

“Agent Barton! I didn’t realize you were coming. It’s great to see you,” Steve says, trying to keep his tone light. He thinks from the eyebrow Natasha shoots him that he hasn’t hidden his concern as well as he’d have liked.

“We brought cupcakes,” she says, holding up a pink bakery box. “And you should call him Clint.”

“I—sure, if that’s OK?” Steve’s not sure what exactly is going on, but even in the short time he’s known her he’s come to realize that it’s generally best to do what Natasha says.

Agent Barton—Clint—sighs a little. “‘Course,” he says quietly. “I’m not a real formal guy.”

“And you should call me Steve,” Steve says. “Dinner’s just getting ready, so go ahead and sit, I’ll bring everything out.”

Steve has baked a chicken— well, he’s baked three chickens, people eat a lot in this Tower—and is serving it with mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots and string beans. It’s simple food, but tasty, and kind of nostalgic. They’d been too poor to eat that well growing up, but Bucky’d been a master at weaseling his way into the good graces of wealthy ladies who might have some odd jobs for two boys and some leftovers to share if they finished up right around dinnertime. He sets everything in the middle of the table.

“Normally I’d just pass it all around,” he says, “but will that be OK with your arm? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’d broken it. Is that from the battle?”

“Punched a wall,” Clint says. “It’ll be fine. Nat’ll help.”

“Oh.” There’s a weird feeling in the room and Steve isn’t sure what he should say, but he really wants to say something. “I killed a lot of heavy bags after I woke up,” he offers, spooning mashed potatoes onto his plate and dousing them in gravy. “I understand needing to punch something. Maybe… not something that’ll hurt you though?”

“Fury’s lucky it wasn’t his face,” Clint mutters.

“Did something happen?” Steve asks. He’s been worried that someone would try to blame Clint for the things he had done while Loki had control of him, since Loki wasn’t around anymore to be punished for it. “Do you need me to talk to him? You’re a valuable member of this team, Clint, we’re not going to let anything happen to you.”

Clint and Natasha exchange complicated looks.

“See?” Natasha says, and Steve isn’t exactly an expert but he’s pretty sure he hears an “I told you so” in her tone. Clint rolls his eyes at her; it’s the most animated Steve has ever seen him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Clint says.

[They eat dinner together. During the course of the dinner, Steve learns a little more about Agent Coulson and how much he meant to Clint.]

.

Steve doesn’t sleep much. Since the serum he’s only needed three or four hours a night anyway, and on top of that, well, a lot has happened to him in the past year or seventy, and sometimes he has bad dreams.

Which is just as well, since it’s currently 3:17 am and his apartment (if you can call it an apartment when it takes up an _entire floor_ of a _skyscraper_ ) is filled with a gentle melodic chime that Tony set up for him when he admitted that having JARVIS just randomly start talking to him out of nowhere was kind of startling in the middle of the night.

“Can I help you, JARVIS?” he asks. It’s not an emergency -- at least it’s not the emergency siren-- but it’s the middle of the night so he’s not sure what else could be going on.

“Apologies for the interruption, Captain,” JARVIS says, “But Mr. Stark would appreciate it if you could visit him in the workshop at your earliest convenience.”

He blinks. “Right now?”

“Mr. Stark has been in the workshop for some time,” JARVIS says, and Steve wonders if he really feels apologetic or if he’s just built to sound that way sometimes. “Your presence would be... much appreciated.”

Steve shrugs. He’s up now, anyway. “OK, sure, I guess. Can it wait long enough for me to get dressed?”

“Of course, Captain. Shall I inform Mr. Stark of your estimated time of arrival?”

“Sure,” Steve says, and doesn’t bother asking how JARVIS knows how long it takes him to get dressed. He has the feeling he probably doesn’t want to think about it too hard.

Ten minutes later, he’s in Tony’s private shop elevator, two large cups of coffee in hand. Caffeine doesn’t actually affect him anymore, but he likes the camaraderie of it. 

“So first, I just want to clarify,” Tony says as the door slides open, “that I was only looking at those files for _completely virtuous_ reasons, OK?”

“That sounds ominous,” Steve says dryly. “Coffee?”

“Oh my _God,_ I knew calling you was the right thing to do,” Tony says, grabbing one of the cups and draining about half of it in a long pull. “JARVIS was all, nooooo, it’s the middle of the night, and I said, pshaw!” He actually pronounces it, puh-shaw, and gestures expansively with the coffee.

“I... think the ‘p’ is silent,” Steve says. Tony looks at him with wide, startled eyes. 

“JARVIS, is that true?” Tony demands.

“The preponderance of authoritative sources would agree so,” JARVIS says. “However, there appears to be a sizable minority who pronounce the ‘p’ in some way as a regional variance.”

“Eugh, fuck that,” Tony says. “Tony Stark is never regional! The ‘p’ is vanished. Goodbye, ‘p’!”

“You were saying something about some files,” Steve suggests, feeling the situation getting away from him.

“Oh,” Tony says, and looks like he’d much rather be arguing pronunciations. “That. Yes. Well.” He hunches over his mug a little, eyeing Steve warily. “So the thing is, I had very pure intentions; I just want that understood up front.”

“The more you say that, the shadier you sound,” Steve points out, “but OK, fine; good intentions. What did you do?”

“I was just looking for his family, all right, or maybe his cellist, that Pepper talks about? I know Fury said it doesn’t work that way with SHIELD, like, they all disavow their pasts and they get put in cold storage when they die or whatever, but he... he saved Pepper’s _life,_ OK, and we owe him something better than that.”

“Who... wait, are you talking about Agent Coulson?” 

Tony nods jerkily. “I was just going to, I dunno, send them something? Like, some flowers, or a fruit basket. Maybe a new cello? Or pay off some bills or something, like, in memory. Endow a music scholarship? Just something nice.”

“That… does sound nice,” Steve says slowly. Nice for Tony, anyway, because the thing about Tony is he only sees the difference between doing _nothing_ and doing _something,_ so sometimes his somethings get a little... excessive. “So what’s the problem?”

“He’s _not dead,_ ” Tony says, and for a moment Steve thinks of all the horrifying ways that someone might be _not dead_ after being killed by Loki’s magic spear, but then Tony says, “look,” and one of his floating computer screens shifts to show what is definitely Agent Coulson, lying apparently unconscious and horribly gray-faced in what appears to be a private hospital room. He’s covered in wires and tubes and connected to an array of machines, and it’s just far too close to certain labs Steve saw in the war for him to feel comfortable at all.

A dozen questions crowd Steve’s brain, most of them starting with _what_ or _how_ or _why_ , but he can’t seem to get any of them out properly. All he can think of is the way Clint has been drifting around the tower like a ghost, spending hours on the range until JARVIS locks him out, the way his shoulders hunch whenever anyone talks about Loki or the Helicarrier. The way he’d looked when Thor had suggested a toast to their fallen brother, the Son of Coul. The way his eyes had looked.

Somewhere underneath his shock, he feels himself getting very, very angry.

“What have you found out?” he says at last, because he knows Tony won’t have stopped there.

“JARVIS, is there audio?” Tony says, pulling the picture large with a flick of his hand.

“Activating,” JARVIS says, and then they can hear it, the clicks and hisses of machinery, the nurse saying, “...minutes, Director Fury,” and the tap of her shoes as she leaves the room.

Fury moves quietly over to the head of the bed and looks down for a moment. The security camera is, fortunately, in the opposite corner of the room, so they can see his face. He seems to just be looking down at Agent Coulson, his sharp eye tracing over tubes and wires and bandages. He reaches down and lays a hand carefully on Coulson’s forearm. He stands very still for a long time.

“God _dammit_ , Cheese, you fucking _hypocrite_ ,” he says at last, spits it out as hard as bullets, and then he’s snatching back his hand and whirling on his heel and gone, the door shushing shut behind him on hydraulics for several seconds after he slams through it.

Steve looks at Tony.

Tony looks at Steve.

“I have absolutely no idea what just happened,” Tony says. “Maybe we’d better get over there first thing.”

[Steve gets a very serious face on and thanks Tony for trusting him with the matter, and says he’s going to have a talk with Fury. Tony is concerned: He’ll have you disappeared! You need backup! and then suggests that they should possibly just break in and kidnap Coulson without bringing Fury into things. After some discussion, the two of them go together to the secret SHIELD medical facility during normal visiting hours, and Steve wields the power of his Captain America Smile and just talks their way in. They camp out next to Phil’s room until Fury shows up, whereupon Steve gives Fury a speech: I’m very disappointed in your behavior. Agent Coulson meant a lot to my team, and this has been very hurtful to them. Tony, standing in the background, is shocked and impressed at Steve’s deviousness, especially when Fury agrees that the team should be informed of Phil’s miraculous recovery, which actually was quite miraculous and had something to do with the Tesseract interacting with the destroyer gun (blah blah asgardcakes.) After the conversation is resolved, Steve tells Tony good job, and that he should be the one to break the good news to the team. Tony arranges for Phil to be transported to a state-of-the-art, super-secure private medical facility in Stark Tower.]

.

The thing about Tony, Steve is coming to realize, is that you can’t take anything he says at face value. Steve knows that most people would laugh in his face if he tried to explain it, but the longer he lives in the Tower, the more convinced he is that he’s right. Steve may have been made famous by the serum, but he had grown up a sickly weakling with a big mouth in a tough part of Brooklyn, and he was good at spotting when someone was putting on an act. It took him a while to peg Tony, though, for the simple reason that Tony’s putting on an act very nearly all the time for the first several weeks of their acquaintance. Steve had noticed his artificiality, but it was so pervasive that he had mistaken it, at first, for Tony’s actual personality.

He still feels bad about that, but in his defense, Tony is a very, very good actor, at least in such a well-practiced role. He’s been living up—down? to the expectations of others, at least on the surface, for a long, long time. (Steve knows what a celebutante is now—and hadn’t THAT been an interesting conversation with Agent Hill—and he’d bet money that Tony hadn’t been one back then, either.)

Anyway, once Steve had seen the crack in the armor (and how obvious, really, that Tony had built himself a suit of armor that only JARVIS could get inside, a flashy, shiny, scarlet suit of armor that could shoot or fly out of any place where Tony might be imprisoned?) he maybe became a little obsessed with seeing more of what Tony was hiding.

(He thinks of sitting in bed, wheezing through the aftermath of another attack, Bucky perched next to his hip trying to teach him card tricks: “the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.” Tony’s hands are like Bucky’s were, neat and strong and square and callused. He’d bet those clever, scarred fingers would be ace at sleight of hand.)

He started making lists (on paper, written on napkins and receipts at cafes and torn up and thrown away, after, because he lives in a tower with JARVIS and Tony Stark and he isn’t an idiot) - evidence to back up his instincts, gathered a scrap at a time.

Steve doesn’t really need lists—serum, memory, etc.—but he likes them. They’re relaxing. You know where you are with a list.

The first one is called THINGS THAT TONY SAYS ABOUT HIMSELF. The beginning of it is easy:

1\. billionaire

2\. genius

3\. playboy

4\. philanthropist

After that, he cheats a little (because when you start to dig, for all that Tony talks about himself he doesn’t really _talk about himself_ ) and decides to include things that Tony implies, by speech or behavior, and things that Tony allows other people to say about him unchallenged.

1\. narcissist

2\. hedonist

3\. heavy drinker (alcoholic?)

4\. anti-authoritarian/rebel

5\. not a team player

The first two are easy; Clint had installed a link to the Tony Stark Wealth Clock on Steve’s laptop. (Today, Tony’s estimated worth clocks in at $143.18 for every person living in the U.S., which Steve can honestly barely conceptualize.) And as for genius, well, Steve fights beside and lives inside and rides upon and talks to concrete examples of Tony’s genius every day. He feels confident that those two items can be taken as read.

The philanthropy is fairly obvious, too; Tony is actually fairly involved in (and funnels large amounts of money to) the Maria Stark Foundation, and he’s overheard Tony and Pepper discussing things that SI will do for charity loads of times in the Tower. That doesn’t even count everything Tony’s done in the aftermath of Loki’s attack, when he used the arc reactor in the Tower to keep the city’s key infrastructure going and turned SI’s entire transport and delivery network over to delivering emergency supplies and personnel to the area. Tony might tend to shrug it off as PR or tax write-offs, but that doesn’t change the fact that he and Pepper are so involved in so many of the projects personally. Also, Steve is pretty sure that Tony wouldn’t name a tax write-off after his mother, whose name tends to make his eyes go soft and nostalgic instead of the pinched look he gets when Howard’s name is mentioned.

Steve isn’t really sure about the playboy thing, though. He’s aware of Tony’s reputation-- he read all those articles in the file, after all—but Steve is determined that this assessment will depend only on evidence he can directly verify, and he’s seen too much crazy stuff in the press to depend on it. As far as he’s been able to tell, Tony is very much devoted to Pepper and would never even dream of cheating on her. He flirts, sure—he flirts like he breathes, and with pretty much everyone—but he doesn’t seem to mean it; sometimes he uses it to keep his distance from someone or distract them from something he doesn’t want to talk about, and sometimes it seems to be an expression of genuine friendly feeling, but his eyes are always darting to Pepper in any crowd, and Steve has seen no evidence of him bringing anyone back to the Tower. It’s possible that he’s somehow sneaking off to have assignations, but that doesn’t really seem like something a playboy would do. 

Of course, Steve knows that there’s more to being a playboy than just sleeping with lots of beautiful women; the word implies a certain lifestyle that mostly involves, in Steve’s mind, spending a lot of time drinking champagne on yachts, and never working. Steve decides that while Tony might be accurately said to be something of a hedonist (the size of the beds in the Tower alone!) he stays too busy for “playboy” to be accurate, and besides, Steve’s never even heard him mention a yacht, though he’d guess Tony probably has one somewhere.

He thinks about the narcissist thing for a while. When he’d first met Tony, he’d have accepted it as fact without a qualm; Tony’s artfully-mussed hair, his intricate beard, his expensive clothes, and the way he constantly talked himself up all screamed of vanity and self-absorption. But as he got to know Tony—the more he watched the things that Tony did rather than listened to the things he said—the more he started thinking that the whole thing was a smokescreen. A man who is so ready to die to save other people can’t be someone who thinks he’s more important than everyone else. More and more, Steve wonders if Tony really thinks that he’s the least important, and if all the boast and bluster is some sort of desperate attempt to keep everyone else from finding out.

The drinking thing... Steve really isn’t sure about. It’s true that Tony’s most common prop is a glass of expensive liquor, but Steve has lived in the man’s house for several months now and he’s never seen Tony seem drunk. He could be hiding it, Steve supposes, but that wouldn’t really be in line with the reputation he has. Of course, it’s possible that he just has an extremely high tolerance. Steve decides that there isn’t enough evidence to decide, and tables that item pending further investigation.

The last two items on his list are “anti-authoritarian” and “not a team player,” which Steve thinks kind of go together. He’s inclined to agree with both of them, at least for now, with the caveat that Tony’s mostly not a team player because he’s never really worked with a team before. He’d actually done really well during the battle of Manhattan, coordinating strikes with the Hulk and tactics with Hawkeye, and Steve was willing to bet that given time (and trust, and a rather idiosyncratic leadership style which Steve admits to himself he’s still working on perfecting), he’d actually do fine.

The anti-authoritarian thing stands as written.

.

Steve gets a chance to gather more evidence about Tony’s drinking habits a few days later, at a charity gala that only he and Tony are invited to. It’s the first one that hasn’t included the whole team, and stripped of his normal retreat strategy (standing near Bruce and remarking loudly that crowds made him angry) he’s nervous about it. Public appearances are his least favorite part of the job; he always feels like a phony, always hears the echo of Colonel Phillips calling him a chorus girl (which had stung but had also been unfair to the actual chorus girls, who worked really hard for very little money and had, to a woman, been genuinely concerned with helping the war effort as best they could). 

Agent Sitwell (still filling in as their liaison while Agent Coulson was convalescing) had asked if he wanted a SHIELD agent to be made available to be his date for things like this, but he’d declined; as bad as it was to get trotted out at these things, it would be worse to be there with someone who was getting paid to go with him. He’d thought about asking Natasha, because she could blend in anywhere and could also stab anyone who needed it, but she was on a SHIELD assignment and also, they’d been cautioned against making it look like there was dating among the team in front of press. Tony’d walked in on the end of the conversation, shot Steve a sharp look over his sunglasses, and said, “Cap can come with me and Pep. We’ll keep the sharks off, and anyone asks, we’ll just tell them he’s married to democracy or something.” 

Steve had rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t help grinning a little, too, because Tony at a party was probably glitzy enough for even him to hide behind if needed.

Tony was as good as his word. He swept through the ballroom like he owned it (and knowing Tony, he might), collecting a constellation of hangers-on. He claimed a drink pretty much instantly and took a swig, then made a face and said something disparaging about the quality, which led to a story about a time he’d gone to the UK on a whisky tour, which led to a lively debate about which of several types was best, which led to Tony leading a procession to the bar and proceeding to order four or five different drinks, which he encouraged everyone around him to taste and vote for their favorite; when they were done, he left them on the bar and ordered a fresh glass of the winner, shoving what Steve was pretty sure was a hundred dollar bill across to the bartender.

The whole evening was like this; it was like Tony was playing a shell game with his drinks. He ordered and sniffed them, sometimes he sipped and once or twice gulped, but he was constantly ridding himself of one barely touched drink to get another.

At the end of the night Tony had barely spent half an hour without a drink in his hand (and most of that time he’d been dancing), but he’d only consumed enough to make... maybe two? Which wasn’t really much at all; even Pepper had had three flutes of champagne.

“So,” he said on the way home, when Pepper had dozed against Tony’s shoulder, “that thing with the booze; is that a business thing?”

Tony shot him a narrow-eyed look. “I party hearty, you know me, Cap. I’m sure you’ve heard Fury bewailing it often enough.”

“You put on a great show,” Steve said. “I’d have never noticed if I hadn’t been looking, but once I started looking it was obvious.”

Tony snorted. “Obvious to you maybe, Captain Perfect Eyesight.”

“I was a soldier,” Steve said. “I have a lot of practice watching people drink. Or not drink, as the case may be.” He looked over; Tony looked a little wary but not particularly tense. “You’re really good,” he said again. “Nobody questioned it. How long have you been doing that? I imagine it could come in handy.”

“Couple years,” Tony said, one hand creeping up to rub at his chest. “Used to be, I’d really drink like that, but, well. You try detoxing in a cave and see how much you’d like to do it again.”

“Doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“Understated and elegant as always. It was fucking awful. But when I got back... well. People were saying I’d lost it, you know? I had to get back out there somehow, but once I built the suit...”

“You had to be ready for anything,” Steve agreed. 

“That’s me: Tony Stark, boy scout.” Tony made a gesture with the hand that wasn’t in Pepper’s hair; it had nothing to do with the Boy Scouts, but Steve didn’t quibble.

“It’s a good strategy,” Steve said simply. “Smart.” 

“Whatever you say, Cap,” Tony said, looking at him oddly, and Steve just smiled.

.

The Avengers start to settle into each other, and they are called to fight, sometimes in small groups, sometimes all together. It's good work, and Steve thinks sometimes he can see it on the others' faces, the growing certainty that they can do this. One night, he's making the rounds, checking the common areas and the labs, making sure that everyone is settled and has what they need (he can't sleep until he knows, after a fight, sometimes, and the others all pretend not to notice or seem not to mind) when he sees Pepper Potts sitting in the dark on one of the couches in the big TV room. He wouldn't have even noticed her, only a shaft of light from the window is falling on her hair, making it shine in the dim room. 

He starts to leave, but she's seen him already, waves him over, and he realize she's not alone; Tony's stretched out on the couch, head in her lap. He perches in front of her on a cream leather ottoman. He can't see her face very well, silhouetted against the window, but she turns her head toward him and he sees her face is wet. 

It shocks him, honestly. Admittedly, he doesn't know her very well, but despite the way that she and Tony bicker he's never seen her really look upset. He wonders, with a sudden uneasy clench in his gut, if Tony had been injured worse than he'd let on, earlier. 

"Is.... Is everything all right?" he whispers, finally.

She huffs a rusty little laugh. "Yes," she says, just as quiet. "And no." She looks down at Tony, at her hand running lightly through his messy hair, skirting around the bandage on his temple from where a robot had thrown Iron Man through a wall earlier.

"Is Tony—“

"Just bruises, apparently," she says. " _Just."_

"That's.... good, though, right? That it's not any worse?"

She flips down the blanket covering Tony. "I don't know, Steve," she says. "You tell me," and he sucks in a breath, because Tony isn't wearing a shirt, and in the glow of the arc reactor he can see that Tony's torso is mottled with bruising, all the way down his side.

"I didn’t—he didn't say anything," Steve says, and he feels oddly betrayed, because since when has Tony ever not said anything?

"The thing about Tony," Pepper says, "is that he talks to cover up the things he doesn't want to talk about. Sometimes you have to listen more to what he doesn't say." Her hand never stops moving, a pale blur in Tony's dark hair. Steve feels like he shouldn't be here, but he's frozen, unable to leave.

"He thinks he has to live up to you," she says. "Don't you dare let him kill himself trying."

He wants to tell her that there's no way that's true, but in the end he just says, "I won't."

When Pepper leaves, six weeks later, she comes to find him on her way out of the tower. Her eyes are reddened, but her cheeks are dry. 

"Keep your promise," she says, her voice low and fierce.

"I will," he replies, and she nods, and walks away.

.

In the weeks after Pepper leaves, it is possible that Steve overcompensates a bit. 

[Descriptions of various ways Steve tries to help Tony feel better: cooking for him, inviting him to go places, watch TV together, etc. During this time they grow closer together as friends.]

.

Steve and Clint are in the gym, Steve spotting Clint as he does bench presses. Clint’s not what you’d call a big guy, but he’s like a bulldog, compact and sturdy and square and tenacious, densely muscled yet still flexible, and all of it the product of near-constant work. Steve doesn’t talk about it much, because he’s worried he won’t make it sound like the compliment he means it as, but deep down he feels like the things that Clint and Natasha and Tony and Agent Coulson push their bodies to do are more worth admiring than what the serum gave him. He may not have experienced it lately, but he remembers how it feels to try to force your way past the limitations of your own body; the struggle, the pain of failure, the breathless floating rush when you succeed.

He misses it, sometimes.

Anyway, he’s spotting Clint as he works, powerful chest and shoulders laboring together in time to Clint’s workout music, when Tony sticks his head in.

“Hey, Barton, have you seen—” he breaks off and raises an eyebrow at them. “Seriously? You’re in here, pumping iron,” he makes an exaggerated bicep-curling gesture, “listening to _Kesha?”_

“Fuck you, Stark,” Clint says, grinning but not pausing in his rhythm. “You know she’s your spirit animal. JARVIS?”

The track skips for a second, then picks up, the singer declaring, “Well the party don’t start till I walk in!” and Tony sputters a laugh as though despite himself.

“Subornation and treason!” he says. “I knew it was a bad idea to introduce you to my AI.”

“Whatever, you love it,” Clint says cheekily, and Tony wanders off, shaking his head and bickering with JARVIS, evidently forgetting whatever it was he’d come looking for.

“I have no idea what just happened,” Steve admits, and Clint actually has to put the barbell down this time, he’s laughing so hard. 

Truth be told, Steve thinks he has the gist of things, but seeing Clint’s face all crumpled up with laughter after everything that happened is worth being the butt of a hundred jokes.

.

The thing about Tony is that he really doesn’t seem to like being a playboy all that much.

The thing about Tony is that he keeps trying to give Steve things, and it’s making him very uncomfortable.

It starts out relatively small. Tony makes new straps for the shield, reinforced ones made out of some on new polymer, that stretch just enough but don't give. Then, upgrades to his suit, making it lighter while keeping its strength. Even the motorcycle could be seen as Avengers equipment, like Clint’s new quiver or Bruce’s super-memory-polymer pants. 

Later, though, things get a little weirder. It's the personal things that seem strange, like how his new apartment on the Tower is completely furnished with antiques even though the rest of the tower is all leather and chrome. Then it's art supplies. Lots and lots of art supplies, all top-of-the-line, highest-quality, extremely expensive, and very impractical for someone who mainly uses pencils. It’s like Tony just opened up a supply catalog and picked up one of everything that was there. It's such a nice gesture on his part, though, that it seems like it would be ungrateful to complain. Tony has even made him a studio space in his new apartment, with north-facing light. Steve isn't sure how he knew that it should have north-facing light; maybe he hired someone?

The clothes, though, do make him feel a little weird. Sure, maybe things have changed since the 40s, but he still isn't sure that friends buy each other underwear, even if it is very nice underwear. He wears it anyway, though. He doesn't want to waste it. Also if he tried to give it back, it might hurt Tony's feelings. Some people might say that Tony doesn't have feelings to be hurt, but by this time Steve knows him well enough to know that isn't true. Granted, hurt feelings don't look the same on Tony as on other people. It's more likely to manifest itself in a tiny, near imperceptible flinch, and then a barrage of sharp, pointed words.

It's when Tony offers to buy the Dodgers and move them back to Brooklyn that Steve thinks things might really be getting out of hand. He’s not sure if Tony's joking, but he’s seenTony buy enough things—over-the-top, bizarre, completely impractical for anyone who isn't a billionaire things—that he takes care to make it very clear to Tony that he really, really doesn’t want Tony to interfere with the team. 

Even if it is a travesty that they moved out of Brooklyn. 

"You know you don't have to buy my friendship," he tells Tony one day, hesitantly.

"I can sure try," Tony says, and he's laughing like it's a joke, but Steve isn't sure.

  


THINGS THAT TONY THINKS ABOUT ME

1\. prudish

2\. naive

3\. hidebound

[There was meant to be some discussion of Steve’s rebellious side, his adrenaline junkie streak, and other traits that Tony only gradually comes to realize as Steve deliberately shows him.]

.

[Each of the following was meant to have a short scene demonstrating the topic discussed.]

The thing about Tony is that he thinks his value to the team can be expressed in a spreadsheet.

.

The thing about Tony is that if you don’t need him he can’t figure out how to relate to you.

.

The thing about Tony is that he’s just as much an alien as Thor, but people don’t make allowances for it because he’s technically human.

.

The thing about Tony is that he thinks moderation is for people who don’t stand behind their ideas.

.

The thing about Tony is that you have to listen to his actions, not his words.

It’s after a mission when Tony’s suit got knocked offline by some sort of energy pulse weapon (seriously, Steve HATES energy pulse weapons) and the team had ripped the faceplate off in a panic to make sure he was OK (because Tony wasn’t moving, wasn’t talking, just dangled like a broken toy in Hulk’s arms for nearly three horrible minutes before Thor managed to get to them) that Tony calls Steve down to the workshop.

“So, seriously,” he says, as Steve comes through the door, “do you realize that ripping the faceplate off the helmet costs about seventy-eight thousand dollars to repair? And that’s if you don’t twist too hard and the futures markets are behaving.”

That’s... pretty horrifying, actually.

“I’m sorry, Tony,” Steve says, “but you know your own safety has to take precedence. If you’re non-responsive—”

“I know, I know!” Tony interrupts, hands up, "and believe me, I am very committed to, you know, life. Which is why I’m going to show you how to use the emergency manual releases on the suit.”

[Tony shows Steve how to manually get him out of the suit; it is an expression of trust and growing physical comfort with one another.]

THINGS THAT TONY CALLS PEOPLE

Bruce

1\. jolly green

2\. green bean

3\. green machine

4\. lab buddy

5\. science bro

6\. big green jellybean

Thor

1\. point break

2\. pert plus

3\. sparky

4\. pantene

5\. thunder muffin

6\. van der graff

7\. thunder buns

Clint

1\. legolas

2\. katniss

3\. cupid

4\. robin hood

5\. merida

6\. agincourt

7\. william tell

8\. orion

9\. artemis

Natasha

1\. agent romanoff

2\. natasha

3\. natalie

Colonel Rhodes

1\. rhodey

2\. rodeo

3\. honeybear

4\. sugarbear

5\. sugar britches

6\. sugar dumpling

7\. snugglebear

Agent Couson

1\. agent

2\. phil

Pepper

1\. pepper

2\. pep

Me

1\. captain

2\. cap

3\. steve

He thinks for a moment and writes “Capsicle,” then he thinks a while longer and erases it. That one was just once, on the helicarrier, and they’d pretty much agreed after the fact that anything said in that particular conversation Didn’t Count.

[Steve is trying to figure out if the number of nicknames has any bearing to how Tony feels about people. The working theory is that friends get a lot, but Steve isn’t sure what it means that he, Pepper, and Phil don’t have many.]

.

[More short scenes that illustrate Steve’s growing attachment]

The thing about Tony is that he wears his heart on his sleeve and he’s terrified of people noticing.

The thing about Tony is that he’s so fucking brave.

[Tony makes the first move and they get together.]

.

[Their relationship, illustrated by more of Steve’s lists]

PARTS OF TONY THAT I WOULD LIKE TO KISS

1\. the place on his left ring finger that bends funny because he broke it in the shop once and didn’t come out to get it set until he finished coding Butterfingers

2\. the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes

3\. the corner of his mouth when it’s doing that thing where it gets tight

.

He starts writing his lists at home and leaving them around. Sometimes Tony adds things to the lists. 

It pays off.

THINGS TO DO WITH TONY

1\. go to a baseball game. only buy snacks and souvenirs (the team and the stadium do not count as souvenirs.) _you’re no fun._ That’s not what you said yesterday.

2\. draw him _naked_

3\. 

THINGS THAT TONY CALLS ME

1\. cap

2\. steve

3\. baby

4\. babe

5\. apple pie

6\. sweetheart

7\. spangles

The thing about Tony is that Steve loves him.


End file.
